The Moths and Butterflies 
418 
familiarly known to the amateur collector and crawlery owner. And popular 
books like Dickerson’s “Moths and Butterflies,” Eliot and Soule’s “ Cater¬ 
pillars and Their Moths,” etc., which tell in 
detail of the life-history and habits of various 
Lepidoptera, mean by “moths,” first Saturnians, 
then Sphingids, and finally a scant sprinkling 
of “others.” The giant vividly colored cater¬ 
pillars, the great silken cocoons safely enclosing 
their mystery until that day when a marvel of 
Fig. 600. Fig. 601. 
Fig. 600. —Venation of Clisiocampa americana. cs, costal vein; sc, subcostal vein; 
r, radial vein; m, medial vein; c, cubital vein; a, anal veins. (After Comstock; 
enlarged.) 
Fig. 601.—The American lappet-moth, Gastropacha americana. (After Lugger; natural 
size.) 
living color and pattern slowly crawls out and unfolds and takes on the 
seeming of the perfect cecropia or polyphemus, it is little wonder that the 
giant silkworm-moths are—always never overlooking the swift and masterful 
Sphingids—the moths of popular fancy. 
Just because these moths are so well known and so well and fully written 
of elsewhere I may limit my account of them to a brief descriptive catalogue 
of adults and larvae with the particular aim of making the more common 
species determinable by amateurs. The particular species in hand once 
safely identified, details of life-history and habits can be looked for in the 
many popular or technical accounts of the various kinds. In all, the males 
can be distinguished from the females by their large antennas and smaller 
bodies. In some species the sexes are very different in color and pattern. 
Of the genus Sarnia, the real giant silkworms, four species occur in 
this country. S. cecropia , the great cecropia-moth of the eastern states, 
expands 5 to 6 inches, has red thorax with white collar, red abdomen 
banded with white and black lines, wings with grizzled gray ground, and 
markings, as shown in Fig. 602, of reddish white and blackish with clay- 
colored outer margins. The large discal spots on the wings are whitish in 
the center, surrounded and encroached on by reddish, and margined with a 
narrow black line. The full-grown larva (Fig. 604) is nearly 4 inches 
long, pale limpid green, and bears on its back conspicuous tubercles, coral- 
